We went to the fair yesterday. The Wife had a better time than I think she had anticipated. I had an experience other than I had anticipated. My expectation was to run in to people I knew; I saw no one I knew at all.
The Wife, however, really enjoyed the livestock displays and the petting zoo. We got to play with a lot of goats. Normally, urban dwellers don’t get to interact with livestock all that much, so it was fun and novel for me, too. The goats we interacted with were all gentle and used to being fed by hand, and did not make much noise. Like dogs, they have their own personalities; some are more receptive to petting and love from humans, others want food, some are more willing than others to push another animal aside to get food. 
Particularly amusing to me was the baby zebra who really liked goat milk (pictured).
The little pygmy goats are small enough to feasibly keep as pets in a suburban house, although obviously such a creature would be an outdoor-only beast. I wonder how well the dogs and the goat would get along. Also having a goat around would mean no garden for sure. On the plus side, I’d never have to mow the back yard again. I’m not seriously thinking about getting a goat but they were pretty durn cute. I liked the floppy-eared ones the best. We also found the Navajo sheep interesting; the ram had four horns. The difference between the wool and the hair on the animal is quite noticeable; I’ve never bothered to learn how the hair is sorted out from the wool but I’m sure that sheep farmers are able to do that with some efficiency.
The biggest local product submitted for competition, to my great surprise, were not carrots or onions (the big commercial crops grown out here) but peaches. Are there that many people who have fruit-bearing peach trees in their back yards that they can enter their fruit for competition? Is it just a coincidence that peaches are harvested around this time of year that they are featured so prominently? I know there are people with avocados, citrus, and cherry trees around, but none of those fruits were evident anywhere. Maybe avocados are simply not “county fair” enough.
We also enjoyed the craft and arts exhibits; I got a kick out of the hucksterism in the exhibit hall with people selling Super Chamois and hot tubs and super-expensive “waterless cookware.” We didn’t buy much of anything other than a pair of sunglasses for me and a new wallet for The Wife. One of the things we noticed was that there were a lot of photography contest entries; the number of really good photographs, though, was quite low. We surmise that there are few barriers to entry for those who wish to take photographs of vacations and other events they’d take pictures of anyway. I doubt my “best” photos would stand up to competition unless I got incredibly lucky to capture something at exactly the right moment.
We also didn’t do any midway rides — most of them make me sick to my stomach and give me astonishingly painful headaches — and didn’t eat any of the expensive junk food. I’ll just have to wait next year for my deep-fried Oreo cookie and vanilla ice cream sandwich or a foot-long corn dog. All the same, I was glad The Wife suggested we leave and eat off the premises; we weren’t going to stick around for the night’s entertainment anyway, and so we wound up spending probably about the same amount of money we would have and had good sushi instead.
